33% of candidates received no preparation information or communication prior to an interview.

18% of candidates did not receive information or next-steps after their interview.

Only 20% of candidates were notified by email that they weren’t being considered for a position.

Do you think these stats are no big deal, or not important to your business? Think again. Candidates say they’ll share a negative recruitment experience with friends and family 66% of the time.

A bad reputation can spread quickly and make recruiting new candidates more difficult. On the other hand, if your company takes the time to implement smart software and modern engagement techniques to improve your candidate’s experience, you just might make your company more desirable to those candidates, and actually end up lowering your recruitment costs.

To that end, here are four ways that you can use software and modern engagement techniques to take better care of your candidates.

4 Engagement Techniques That Improve the Candidate Experience

These five techniques are being used by major staffing firms through our software. Sense makes sure that you can communicate with your candidates and that no one gets left out or forgotten.

1. Automate communication

Does it sound like a lot to ask that you need to notify candidates when you’re not interested, what their next steps are in the interview process, where their interview will take place, and ask them for feedback on the interview process? It’s not overwhelming when you have automated communication.

Automated texts and emails can send basic communications and instructions to candidates. This can range from a polite rejection email that their skills aren’t matched with your company to a map of where to park and navigate the campus to get to their interview on time. Sense makes this easy by automating the process and making it simple to communicate, whether you’re using emails or texts.

2. Continuously Measure NPS

Net Promoter Score isn’t just for measuring customer satisfaction anymore. You can use NPS to measure numerous aspects of the recruitment process:

Appeal and knowledge of the hiring manager

Success of the communication to the candidate

Ease of the application process

Respect of candidate’s time

How likely the candidate or rejected candidate is to recommend or continue to use the company’s product

Just imagine the possibilities! By measuring and tracking NPS score for these different aspects of the recruitment and candidate care process, your company can continue to improve their engagement and recruitment process with candidates. NPS shouldn’t be something you run once a year or once a quarter, either.

3. Intervene Quickly in Problems Reported through Feedback

One of the major benefits of asking for feedback continuously is being able to quickly address and solve problems. Whether you need to intervene with an individual candidate who had a poor experience or discover a systemic problem with your hiring process, you can respond quickly by monitoring your NPS.

One simple text message and follow-up phone call can make the difference between a consultant not returning for her second day, and going on to complete her assignment. That text message and phone call can improve the consultant’s experience, as well as the client’s experience.

Sense makes it simple to communicate with candidates and consultants by automating and personalizing communication. Our software is intelligent enough to notice if a candidate doesn’t respond to text messages and to then send communication by email. Our software can also learn to send communications at the time that a candidate is most likely to open and interact with it. This level of personalization is almost impossible to implement cost-effectively without software.

What Candidates Want

All of these observations and techniques might seem arbitrary if we didn’t talk about what candidates want. If candidates don’t want personalized communication, then there’s no point in putting the process into place.

According to the Talent Board report cited earlier, candidates listed three things that they wanted during the interview process:

To be prepared ahead of time

To have the opportunity to answer relevant questions

To receive feedback after the interview

We don’t think those are overly demanding requests for candidates to make of companies. If you want more specifics, it’s simple, just ask your candidates. Talent Board reported that 57% of candidates were never asked for feedback.

Asking for feedback will help you improve your recruiting process and candidate care, but can also further benefit your business. According to CareerBuilder’s Applicant Experience Study, 44% of candidates “who didn’t hear back from an employer when they applied for a job said they have a worse opinion of that employer. In a separate study, nearly one-third of job seekers (32%) reported they are less likely to purchase a product from a company who didn’t respond to their job application.”

If you want to keep your candidates happy and thinking highly of your company, especially those you don’t hire, it’s important to use software and modern engagement techniques to improve your candidate experience.

Want to find out how Sense helped raise one company’s NPS to +76? (Yes, we really did it.) Request a demo to find out how we can help you to improve your candidate care by measuring candidate NPS.